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#4_Belém
a project by Silvia Calderoni and Ilenia Caleo together with Berna Reale and the complicity of Rachel Brumana
project curated by Paola Granato
writing Ilenia Caleo
translation Rachel Brumana
production of For The Time Being (Prototyping the Queering Platform) by Freespace, West Kowloon Art Park/Cultural District Hong Kong
SO IT IS_Bèlem is the fourth stage of SO IT IS project and it is an invitation to the performance artist Berna Reale: embracing a practice and building an unpredictable imaginary of what bodies can be and do.
Imagining the project's fourth poster in Brazil, we involved Rachel Brumana – curator, friend, accomplice and very sensitive insight into art practices – and asked her to think together about an artist from the Brazilian performance scene who could connect with the work. Thus, we arrive to Berna: practices of contact of contact of contact.
After several zoom meetings of exchange and co-design, Berna chose the popular Ver-O-Peso market in Belèm do Pará, the city where she lives and works, as her poster site. It was important to her that the poster will not live near galleries or cultural institutions, "protected" places, but come into contact with gazes that do not usually frequent artistic environments. In particular, Berna is interested in the relationship between the poster's imagined, sexualized, modified body and the bodies of male and female workers who traverse the market, for many hours during the day, often in semi-nudity.
We invited Berna to appropriate – with complete freedom – the rules we wrote to communicate the practice of creating the poster.
Rules:
– each poster is one and unique, like our bodies (as long as it is not our desire that changes this indication)
– the shot is full-length, the body is naked
– the size of the poster is full size
– the body is at rest and not in an action
– the interventions on the body are carried out in graphic post-production / photomontage
– each poster is posted in a different city
– the artist chooses the exact place for the posting, based on their city and the communities that live there
>>>THE POSTER WAS INSTALLED AUGUST 1st IN THE MARKET OF VER-O-PESO, BELÈM.
Throughout its stages, SO IT IS _# weaves a network of affections and relations: a practice of contact with the people we will meet and the communities surrounding them, materialising in an urban, non-virtual space. It is a gesture of infestation of public spaces.The map of posters will be put together, stage by stage.
Berna Reale is one of the most important contemporary artists in Brazil. She lives and works in Belém do Pará. Her work is grounded in performance practice, which she has been developing since 2009, and explores the use of her own body as a central aesthetic element. Berna's performances critically address the theme of violence through an investigation of its physical and symbolic representations, and the inevitable shadow of censorship-artistic action is for Berna a means of revealing the importance of image-making in keeping freedom of thought alive. The power of these images is to produce a double movement: a desire for rapprochement that is countered by a sense of repulsion-an ambivalence that recalls the irony of fascination and at the same time disgust for the violence typical of Brazilian society. Berna Reale's work is deeply connected to photography, understood as a tool not only for recording but also for perpetuating and disseminating her actions once the performance is over.
https://nararoesler.art/en/artists/69-berna-reale/
Rachel Brumana has a degree in performing arts from Unicamp and works in the field of production, management and curatorship of performing and visual arts. She coordinates the production of MITsp - Mostra Internacional de Teatro in São Paulo and collaborates with several international projects mainly a|from São Paulo, where she resides (and resists) most of the time and where she works on projects inspired by collaboration, activism, freedom of expression, environmental agendas and human rights.
In 2022, she curated the second edition of SCENA - Rassegna di Teatro Contemporaneo Italiano a São Paulo, a co-realization of the Italian Cultural Institute of São Paulo with SESC. The program brings together female artists, playwrights, directors, and thinkers who move between the performing arts scene, visual arts, arts and academic training, and political and artistic activism.